Communication for Modern Teams with Slack

Office communication can often be a jumble of cobbled-together moving parts - so it can be incredibly useful to have a tool that creates a centralised hub where all team interaction takes place. Slack is just that tool. Its stated mission is to make our working life simpler, more pleasant and more productive. For our team at SubHub, it certainly has.

Slack’s portal format provides live group or private chat, file sharing, search, notifications and can integrate with dozens of external tools such as GitHub, Zendesk and MailChimp - to name just a few. Activity alerts from these services will instantly display in real-time as well - keeping you updated across the whole of your office network in a single spot.

And yet, Slack’s simple and straightforward design brings a sense of order and seamlessness to all these various interactions.

Its main navigation is a single column divided into three categories: Channels for open project communication, Direct Messages for individual conversations and Private Groups whose content is visible by invitation only.

By clicking on any channel, individual or group you can join its conversation, scroll its history and search its content. Slack syncs across all platforms. And its mobile apps for iOS and Android make it fully accessible wherever you go.

It has so many thoughtful little details. You can star items for easy recall, edit already posted messages and keep things fun with emoji.

Their pricing plans fit all budgets from free to $15 monthly per user.

For teams working remotely, Slack provides a sense of community - a virtual water cooler where everyone can congregate - catch up on weekend plans or Monday business. As a collaborative tool, Slack is more than the sum of its parts.